Innehållsförteckning för January 2025 från Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, It is well known that many of our most excruciating arguments about religion and philosophy are secretly arguments about definitions. With that said, I will add, it is quite a novel thing when the definition is in the foreground and everyone knows that is what they are arguing about. A doozy of a definition argument is brewing right now at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI recently released version one of their definition for “Open Source AI” [1]. At a glance, the definition appears to fall squarely into the basic open source ethos. The user is accorded the right to: • Use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission. • Study how the system works and understand how its results were created.…

Fedora is beloved by many as a Linux distribution that not only just works but is powerful, efficient, and ready for users of all types. However, Fedora’s main edition ships with the Gnome desktop, which some new users might have trouble acclimating to. Fear not, because Fedora KDE is now listed as an official spin. What does this mean? First off, Fedora KDE will now be listed at the same level as the Workstation edition on fedoraproject.org (http://fedoraproject.org/). Next, it means there will be a new flagship site page for Fedora KDE. Finally, there also will be marketing support for Fedora KDE that is along the same lines as the Workstation edition at events. This was opened two months ago and was finally made a reality on November 8. If…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN HPC http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/ KISS – Adding a New User • Jeff Layton We review how to accomplish simple, obvious tasks that are usually not addressed in HPC, starting with how to add users. ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Kubernetes Networking in the Kernel • Abe Sharp Cilium and eBPF put Kubernetes networking down in the kernel where it belongs. Managing Infrastructure as Code with Spacelift • Martin Loschwitz The Spacelift infrastructure-as-code management platform quickly rolls out complete setups to the cloud, minimizing the possibility of failure and problems. Supercharge Your Software Upgrade Routine • Daniel LaSalle Topgrade steps forward as the hero to help you keep the upper hand over updating and upgrading your stable of Linux applications. Flexible Backup for Large-Scale Environments • Harald Däubler Bacula is a…

The latest release of the Gnome desktop (https://www.gnome.org/) was delayed for a week, but it has finally arrived with some fixes and improvements, without much in the way of game-changing features. The primary focus of Gnome 47.1 is all about polish. The changes are quite minor but do make a difference. Included with the update is an improvement to the accuracy of box shadows, uneven padding, accent color support for tablets, better primary device detection, and a fix for the explicit sync feature for virtual monitors. Epiphany (the Gnome browser) got some love as well: Bookmarks can be added to the incognito mode, tab navigation shortcuts can now be disabled, tooltips were added to the bookmarks tag rows, and several crashes have been addressed. GVfs, Gnome’s userspace virtual filesystem, also…

The bcachefs Patch Submission Process I recently wrote about a conflict between Kent Overstreet and Linus Torvalds in which Linus objected to Kent submitting large patches for his bcachefs filesystem after the merge window had closed. In the end, I concluded that Linus could go either way – either refusing to accept patches from Kent until Kent started following the normal policies for developers, or continuing to debate Kent so long as it seemed Kent was suffering from a legitimate misunderstanding. My sense was that “Linus generally prefers to win an argument rather than enforce his position.” So I had no major prediction to make. The story continued to play out when Kent posted another large patch for bcachefs, to which Linus replied: “I’m getting really fed up here Kent.…

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In this article I’m going to run through installing NetBSD and the xfce4 desktop (Figure 1) on an old, repurposed laptop. The sacrificial machine for me was a ThinkPad T450, which I picked up refurbished on Amazon for £140 (~$180). This model came out in 2015. Older ThinkPads are generally a good choice for BSD compatibility. Additionally, a refurbished Think-Pad will be an order of magnitude more performant than a typical entry-level netbook, which pretty much becomes e-waste the moment it leaves the factory. The T450 I bought came with an Intel Core i5-5300U 2.3GHz CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SATA hard drive. It’s hoped that once this tutorial has got you up and running with NetBSD, you can Google your way to the freedom-respecting OS of your…

Available Starting January 3 Whether you manage an IT landscape or hack on Linux at home, speed matters. Next month we study some strategies for better performance. Also inside: • Capture the Flag • Forgetful Search • LocalSend • Start a RaspPi Remotely • And much more! Please note: Articles could change before the next issue. BE THE FIRST TO SEE WHAT’S NEXT The Linux Magazine Preview is a monthly email newsletter that gives you a sneak peek at the next issue, including links to articles posted online. Sign up at: https://bit.ly/Linux-Update…

Valve has released a new version of the popular Steam gaming app for all supported platforms (including Linux) that not only fixes several bugs but also adds improvements for gaming natively on Linux. The big ticket addition, however, is the built-in Game Recording feature that allows users to record and share their gameplay footage. This new feature makes it easy for you to record and share footage as it runs in the background (so you never miss a moment). You can read about all of the changes in the official announcement (https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/4472730495692571025?utm_ source=SteamDB). As far as Linux is concerned, some of the fixes include miscellaneous common crashes, a slow startup issue (due to a reverse hostname lookup for the loopback interface), detecting and passing commands to an already running Steam…

Fedora 41 is here with a number of updates ranging from patches to new features. The default spin uses the Gnome 47 desktop environment, offering added polish created by the Gnome developers. For those who’ve been using Fedora for some time, you’ll be surprised to discover the developers have switched out the default terminal app for one called Ptyxis. As the new Gnome terminal, Ptyxis includes first-class support for containers, profiles, theming, pinned tabs, and even a terminal inspector. Ptyxis is geared more toward power users, but even those new to Linux shouldn’t have any problem making use of it (should such a situation arise). Fedora 41 also includes enhanced support for ARM-based devices, such as Raspberry Pi and Apple Silicon, along with spins for KDE Plasma Mobile and Kinoite…

On October 15, VirtualBox received another update, three weeks after the previous release (v 7.1.2). Even though version 7.1.4 is a maintenance release, it has added initial support for the latest Linux kernel (v 6.12). However, that addition comes with a caveat. According to the official changelog, “In kernel 6.12, KVM initializes virtualization on module loading by default. This prevents VirtualBox VMs from starting. To avoid this, either add “kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0” parameter into kernel command line or unload corresponding kvm_XXX module.” Along with the support for kernel 6.12, VirtualBox 7.1.4 also introduces automatic upgrading of the Linux Guest Additions for ARM systems, which is handled via the Device menu. You’ll also find the latest NLS update for the Turkish, Indonesian, and Italian languages, a fixed NAT issue (restoring 7.0.X saved state),…

An office suite is part of the standard package on any workstation. When you install Linux on a desktop computer, the free LibreOffice is usually installed on your mass storage device at the same time. But the ubiquitous LibreOffice package is not to everyone’s taste. The LibreOffice package has put on some weight over the years and can be sluggish even on state-of-the-art hardware. And the suite sometimes causes errors with complex documents in Microsoft Office Open XML formats, which makes it difficult to work across platforms. Linux is all about choice, so this seemed like a good time to consider the alternatives. Apache OpenOffice The origins of OpenOffice [1] go back to the year 1984, when Marco Börries, a student from Lüneburg, Germany, developed the StarWriter word processing program…

When I show people some of my freshly captured and beautifully crafted digital photos, they often ask if I can send them a copy. Being the generous giver that I am, I typically hand it over. But if there are several photos that several people are requesting, it’s easier to put the whole collection on the web and share a link so that the recipients can help themselves. This Snapshot column looks at a CGI script, photoup, that lets a privileged user upload one or more photos to a web server. The photos end up in a directory with a random long name that is difficult to guess. The display uses a layout that showcases the photos either in groups or as single views and renders amicably on a desktop…

Nothing is more enchanting than an old photo – that is, if you have a clue about what it is and where it was taken. Depending how old you are and how your brain works, you probably have amazing recall of the people and places in your photos from five years ago? Ten years ago? But it all depends on how many photos you take and how much you travel. And, believe it or not, ten years will go by before you know it. Luckily, our modern digital photo formats have space for metadata: stored details about the picture and where it was taken. This month we show you how to edit photo metadata with digiKam. Also in this month’s Linux Voice, we introduce you to Zettlr, a simple tool…

#289/December 2024 Coding with AI Futurists predict a day when computers will write the computer programs. Are we there already? This month we separate fact from hype to examine some of the popular AI-based coding tools and explore what they can (and can’t) do well. On the DVD: Kubuntu 24.10 and Kali Linux 2024.3 #288/November 2024 Smart Home If you listen to megavendors like Google and Amazon, the only path to a smart home is through the cloud, but the Linux community has a better way. We'll show you some open source smart home tools with no cost and no spying. On the DVD: Rocky Linux 9.4 and MX Linux MX-23.3 #287/October 2024 Ollama Many Linux users are intrigued by Large Language Model (LLM) tools like ChatGPT, but if you…

You read that right; a single line of code from Intel has shown the Linux kernel could receive a performance jump of up to 4,000 percent by way of will-it-scale.per_process_ops. An Intel kernel testing bot discovered this, and the change was added to commit efa7df3e3bb5 (“mm: align larger anonymous mappings on THP boundaries”). That commit was related to efficient memory management and mapping (mm and mmap) techniques that use Transparent Hugepages (THPs) and Page Middle Directory (PMD). Before anyone gets too excited, the discovered performance increase was isolated to a synthetic test case, so real-world workloads will probably never see such incredible gains. However, it does make a solid case for how well Linux is capable of performing. One issue with the change is that it was shown to significantly…

To date, I’ve used Gnome OS as a means to see what’s coming for the desktop environment. Typically, I run Gnome OS from within the Boxes app (because you can’t run it as a virtual machine). However, this will probably change once Gnome OS transitions (as it has been reported by Linuxiac – https://linuxiac.com/gnome-os-to-become-a-general-purpose-linux-distro/) to a general-purpose Linux distribution. There are some things that will remain a part of Gnome OS. First and foremost, it will continue to deliver a very stock, unaltered version of the Gnome desktop environment. Second, it will remain an immutable distribution, which is great for security. Gnome OS will also stick with Flatpak apps as the primary source of app distribution and installation. Adrian Vovk, a contracted developer for Gnome, wrote in his blog (https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-all/),…

AlmaLinux is typically built from the Red Hat source code and maintains full compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). However, earlier this year Red Hat announced it would discontinue releasing traditional betas of their flagship OS. As a result, the AlmaLinux developers decided to create a new build pipeline and a part of that is AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10. Kitten 10 is an early release candidate, so it not not fully matured. However, Kitten gives users and/or third-party projects an advance look into what is happening with the upcoming release of AlmaLinux OS 10. Any project that uses AlmaLinux OS as a base [such as Miracle Linux (https://www.miraclelinux.com/) and Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/unified-communications/unified-communications-manager-callmanager/index.html)] can plan accordingly for testing in their own build processes. Another interesting development is that…

The Slimbook EVO boasts an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, 8 cores, 16 threads, a 16 TOPS neural processing unit, up to 5.12GHz clock speed, and a Radeon 780M GPU all wrapped up in a 14" laptop with a 3K screen, 80Wh battery, up to 96GB of RAM, and an aluminum chassis. The EVO display offers a resolution of 2880x1800, 100 percent sRGB colors, a 120 Hz refresh rate with 400 nits of brightness, and a wide aspect ratio of 16:10 LTPS. The EVO also comes with a super efficient cooling system with dual high-performance fans, which are designed for gaming while also being optimized for quiet operation. You can max out the internal storage to 8TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 and enjoy three different work modes: energy saver, balanced, and…

Too many cooks spoil the broth, people say, and this is frequently true of the smart home sector, too. KNX has been an established standard for building automation for decades. Over 400 manufacturers support this standard because it is considered highly flexible and extremely efficient. At the same, unfortunately, it is also expensive and complex. This explains why manufacturers keep on developing closed-source solutions that are simpler and cheaper, but only work correctly in their own ecosystems. Those systems are primarily suitable for small setups with 100 or fewer devices, while KNX is ideal for extensive projects with several thousand devices. Matter is a new standard that sets out to harmonize IoT and smart home devices from various vendors. More than 280 organizations have already joined forces to support it.…

Jon “maddog” Hall is an author, educator, computer scientist, and free software pioneer who has been a passionate advocate for Linux since 1994 when he first met Linus Torvalds and facilitated the port of Linux to a 64-bit system. He serves as president of Linux International®. Keeping open source open Recently there was an issue where several Russians were listed as maintainers of the Linux kernel whose email addresses contained the ending. ru. These maintainers were removed from the list of maintainers and were told that they might be added back if certain documentation steps were taken. This action seemed sudden and many people objected to the action because it seemed to go against the philosophy of open source. There were a lot of people who decried this, and some…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software Desktop environment KDE Plasma As a Linux user, I’ve always managed to sit on the fence in the Gnome versus KDE debate because my daily driver is Lubuntu, which uses LXQt. Still, KDE releases usually are accompanied by a lot of online fanfare. For instance, when version 6 was released in February, it represented the first major version in a decade. Upgrades included defaulting to the Wayland protocol and improved HDR support. Users could also once again use the famous 3D cube animation to switch between virtual desktops. (This feature had been removed in Plasma 5.2.3 in 2021). For the first time, Plasma also supported logins using both a fingerprint and a password at the same…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to info@linux-magazine.com. FOSDEM 2025 Date: February1-2, 2025 Location: Brussels, Belgium Website: https://fosdem.org/2024/ FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. You don't need to register. Just turn up and join in! State of Open Con 2025 Date: February 4-5, 2025 Location: London,…

Linux Magazine is looking for authors to write articles on Linux and the tools of the Linux environment. We like articles on useful solutions that solve practical problems. The topic could be a desktop tool, a commandline utility, a network monitoring application, a homegrown script, or anything else with the potential to save a Linux user trouble and time. Our goal is to tell our readers stories they haven’t already heard, so we’re especially interested in original fixes and hacks, new tools, and useful applications that our readers might not know about. We also love articles on advanced uses for tools our readers do know about – stories that take a traditional application and put it to work in a novel or creative way. We are currently seeking articles on…